Julián Torres Gómez and the trouble with a good idea

Before Julián Torres Gómez helped build a company for paying people across borders, he brought a container of intelligent toilet seats to Colombia. He had encountered the product while living in Asia and saw an opportunity. The seats arrived. Customers were interested. Then came installation: they did not fit the toilets. Somewhere between the business idea and the bathroom, a rather important measurement had gone missing.

He tells the episode himself, with the useful bluntness of someone who has already paid for the punchline. It belongs to a career that has included music, tourism, a restaurant, executive recruitment, books and technology companies. A tidy biography could arrange these as stepping stones. At the time, several of them were simply things that had failed to work.

Today Torres is the co-founder and CEO of Ontop, the international hiring and payments company he started with Santiago Aparicio and Jaime Abella in 2020. His subject is still the distance between an attractive idea and something that actually works. A contract must survive contact with local requirements. A payment must arrive. The details have grown more elaborate; their capacity to spoil a plan remains familiar.

There is a temptation to treat the toilet-seat story as comic relief before getting to the serious business. It deserves a little more respect. An untested assumption can travel a very long way before someone asks the decisive question. In this case, it crossed an ocean.

The music kept finding him

Torres was born and raised in Bogotá. Before he wanted a technology company, he wanted to be a musician. He wrote songs, played guitar and joined a band that obtained a record deal. The connection he later drew between music and entrepreneurship was quite practical: make something, put it in front of people, discover whether anyone wants it.

At Universidad de los Andes, he began in music before switching to business administration, graduating in 2012. The university also gave him room to explore writing and new ventures. His early projects included a tourism agency and a restaurant. The résumé was acquiring variety rather faster than it was acquiring a clear direction.

After graduation, he spent a year in China. An import-export job paid the rent, while performing at weddings and corporate events brought music back into his working life. A pursuit he had struggled to turn into a career in Colombia became a source of income abroad. Even the abandoned plans had a habit of turning up again.

His phrase for himself is “an entrepreneur with an artist’s soul.” It is a useful description of the range, without requiring every venture to have been part of a master plan. A song and a business both begin with their creator’s enthusiasm. Other people get the next vote.

A job that paid him to try

Back in Colombia, Torres worked at the executive search firm Boyden. Then, in 2015, he joined InQlab as an entrepreneur in residence. He was entering a different way of building businesses: investigate markets, make small versions of ideas, test them and decide what deserved more time and money.

For someone whose earlier experiments had involved physical stock and premises, the appeal is easy to understand. A digital prototype offers a chance to learn before committing to the equivalent of a shipping container. Torres has described this period as his entry into the digital startup world, a job that required him to study business models and unfamiliar markets.

Fitpal emerged from that work. Its membership model brought access to multiple gyms and classes into a single subscription. Torres went on to build it with Aparicio; the company participated in the 500 Startups Miami program in 2018. It provided experience raising capital and assembling a business around a network of participating operators.

It also placed him inside the practical difficulties of expansion. Moving a company into another country involves people, agreements and payments as well as ambition. In the years before Ontop, Torres had accumulated experience on both sides of hiring: finding executives at Boyden and building a team of his own. The next company would make those administrative problems its business.

The world could work together. Paying was harder.

Ontop began in August 2020, as remote work was spreading. Torres and his co-founders were looking at a gap between where people could work and how companies could employ and pay them. A team could collaborate across countries while the machinery behind its contracts and compensation remained awkwardly tied to national borders.

The proposition was concrete. Help a company engage international talent, handle the documentation and move the money. Ontop joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch. Its early Colombian operation had 14 employees when it appeared in the 2021 Forbes list of business promises. By March 2024, its team numbered 270 people across 25 countries. Those are dated snapshots of a business changing shape.

Torres moved to Miami in January 2022. A remote company did not require its founder to report to a particular office, but access to investors and the meeting of Latin American and US business communities mattered to him. Geography was something he could choose for a purpose, even while building a company that promised others more choice over theirs.

The worker’s experience became central to the product. In 2022, he was already describing a wallet alongside the company’s payroll tools. Once a payment arrives, the recipient still has decisions to make about holding, moving and spending it. That second set of needs gave Ontop a reason to look beyond the employer’s monthly task.

This is the distinction that makes his ambitions easier to follow. Payroll happens repeatedly; the worker’s financial life continues between paydays. Building for both creates a different set of responsibilities from merely helping a company complete a transfer. The everyday usefulness of the account has to justify the wider ambition.

Then the job changed

In July 2024, Aparicio left Ontop and Torres assumed the CEO role. Building alongside another founder had become a different assignment: take responsibility for the whole operation and decide how it should run. The company’s next chapter was defined by the economics of growth.

By October 2025, Torres was reporting a restructuring, lower expenses, positive EBITDA and positive cash flow. Ontop had surpassed $1 billion in international payments processed. That total measures money passing through the platform; it is separate from the revenue Ontop earns. Confusing the two would make the business sound rather different from the one he described.

His compact formulation was “Escalar sí, pero con márgenes”: scale, yes, but with margins. The phrase gives an unusually plain account of what he wanted from the company. More activity had to support a business that could sustain itself. Artificial intelligence and automation became part of that effort.

Headcount, payment volume and profitability answer different questions. A larger team can show that a company has expanded. A payment total shows the amount of activity it handles. Positive cash flow says something about whether the operation can fund itself. Torres’s change in emphasis asks readers to pay attention to the third question as well as the first two.

The shift makes an interesting companion to his earlier experiments. The young importer had committed money before checking an essential condition. The CEO’s public argument now puts operating conditions close to the centre of the plan. The bathroom mishap and the company restructuring belong to different stages of his career. Both give the practical details their due.

“Escalar sí, pero con márgenes.”

Julián Torres Gómez · October 2025
Scale, yes, but with margins.

A song has room beside the spreadsheet

Alongside the companies, Torres has published La estupidez colectiva and Hábitos poderosos with Penguin Random House. The first appeared in 2019, before Ontop. Writing belongs to the same stretch of his life as building businesses, rather than an activity reserved for a distant retirement.

Music has continued too. In a public post about an Ontop video, he described composing music around Steve Jobs’s Stanford speech and recording the video with the company. He made clear that fame and money were not the reasons for doing it. Some creative work is allowed to exist without first submitting a revenue forecast.

That is a refreshing detail in the life of someone running a financial technology business. A person can care about margins at work and still make something whose value is difficult to enter into a spreadsheet. The song does not need to become a lesson in productivity to deserve its place.

His connection to other entrepreneurs has also become part of his public work. In 2025, he received Endeavor Colombia’s Multiplier Effect recognition on behalf of Ontop. In acknowledging it, he stressed sharing time, knowledge and support. The recognition concerned what entrepreneurs pass on, as well as what they build for themselves.

The ambition after payday

By June 2026, Torres was discussing the infrastructure of global work in an Ascend interview, including the compliance expertise that international payments require. His ambitions bring creativity into contact with an unusually exacting set of rules. Customer checks, transaction controls and regulatory knowledge are part of the product’s foundations.

He wants Ontop to become financial infrastructure for a global workforce. The ambition includes the company hiring abroad and the person receiving the pay. It puts a large idea in the service of a small, recurring event: somebody has done the work, and now somebody needs to be paid.

The career leading to that ambition resists a neat professional label. Musician, importer, recruiter, founder and author all fit somewhere. Each puts a different kind of work into circulation and waits for a response. Torres has kept returning to that exchange, with enough unsuccessful attempts to make the polished version of entrepreneurship difficult to maintain.

The appeal of his story is in those inconvenient particulars. A record deal did not settle his future. A business degree did not settle his interests. An appealing imported product did not fit. At Ontop, the test arrives again whenever money has to cross a border and reach the person expecting it. There is plenty of room for imagination before payday. On payday, the details count.